The old Persian word pairidaeza meant a walled garden. The beautiful gardens built by Cyrus, Darius, and Babylon are no more. Our blue-marbled earth orbits in immense aridity of space, and wherever we travel from the tall tropical forest to the Sahara, nature provides the glory of flowering fruit trees to roses in a riot of seasonal color.
In 1864 a seminal book written by George Perkins Marsh, entitled Man and Nature, is said to have awakened our conservation conscience. He believed that what people harm, they can heal. Marsh was a distinguished scholar-diplomat from Vermont and a supporter of the young Smithsonian Institution.
Plants and animals have developed through all of evolutionary time. Together intertwined. Neanderthal people may have honored their dead with blossoms. Flowers adorned ancient altars and the patterns of vine and herb, of “the spell cast by leafy glades, by grottoes shaded with leaves and fern welcome the magnificence of springtime in the deserts, mountains and prairies. “Thus we discover what we call Divine Providence has, indeed, a scientific basis.
There are 15 species which are the staple crops that support all of mankind and prevent starvation. Old World grasses, barley, millet, oats, rice, rye, sorghum, and wheat are those. Add various kinds of legumes, the beans, peas, lentils, and root crops such as sweet potato, cassava and yams with bananas, coconut, and sugar cane and these are the foundations of the world’s food crops.
Another thousand species include the fruit-producing trees, shrubs and herbs, the vegetables species, beverages and medicines. Earth has as many as 3,000 plant species. And remember the vast quantity of species whose wood is used for fuel across the world, representing half of all harvested timber.
The Prophet Mohammed is quoted as saying that “If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy narcissus. In this way you nourish both the body and the soul.” The Bible and other religious works are full of references to plants in verdant lands with the familiar verse known to Christians as the “green pastures” of the Twenty-Third Psalm. In the Sumerian cuneiform tablets from the fourth millennium B.C., we learn the word Eden, one of only two Sumerian words to enter directly into the English language. With the light and heat of the sun, we greet plants which sustain, cheer, and cure humanity.
Herbs and plants were grown in hospital gardens of the Arabian empire after the 11th Century and were harbingers of physic gardens in western Europe in the sixteenth century. Pharmacy, as a profession separate from medicine, was an Islamic institution which began in the Ninth Century. Luca Ghini founded Christendom’s first botanic garden at Pisa seven hundred years later. He is considered to be the earliest Western pharmacist.
Botticelli’s masterwork “La Primavera” has been described as having captured the restless spirit of an age. The springtime that it evokes transcends ordinary experience with classical allusion. The sinuosity of line suggests movement in both the people and the allegorical forces of nature. This painting hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
From rainfall patterns to cold ocean currents, from fragrant cedar wood forests to Mediterranean oak trees, this living planet is alive with the music of growth and regeneration. May this Springtime be one of lush harmonies to you and yours.